The Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

April 10 (23)-April 25 (May 8), 1906

3

(1) the election Law of December 11 and the conditions in which the elections
were actually conducted prevented the proletariat and the Social-Democratic
Party from participating in the elections by putting up and independently
securing the election of real Party candidates;

(2) in view of this, the real significance of participation by the workers in
the elections was bound to, and as experience has shown, actually did, lead
to the obscuring of the strictly class position of the proletariat as a
consequence of agreements with the Cadets or other bourgeois groups;

(3) only complete and. consistent boycott enabled the Social-Democrats to
maintain the slogan of convening a constituent assembly by revolutionary
means, to place all responsibility for the State Duma on the Cadet Party
and to warn the proletariat and the peasant or revolutionary democrats
against constitutional illusions;

(4) the State Duma, with its now evident (predominantly) Cadet composition,
cannot possibly fulfil the function of a real representative of the people,
and can only indirectly help to develop a new, wider and deeper
revolutionary crisis;

(1) that by boycotting the State Duma and the Duma elections, the Party
organisations acted correctly;

(2) that the attempt to form a Social-Democratic parliamentary group in
present political conditions, and in view
of the absence in the Duma of really party Social-Democrats capable of
representing the Social-Democratic Party, holds out no promise of reasonable
success, but rather threatens to compromise the R.S.D.L.P. and place upon it
responsibility for a particularly harmful type of parliamentarians, mid way
between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats;

(3) that in view of the foregoing, conditions do not yet exist to enable our
Party to take the parliamentary path;

(4) that the Social-Democrats must utilise the State Duma and its conflicts with
the government, or the conflicts within the Duma itself, fighting its
reactionary elements, ruthlessly exposing the inconsistency and vacillation
of the Cadets, paying particular attention to the peasant revolutionary
democrats, uniting them, contrasting them with the Cadets, supporting such
of their actions as are in the interests of the proletariat, and preparing
to call upon the proletariat to launch a determined attack on the autocracy
at the moment when, perhaps, in connection with a crisis in the Duma, the
general revolutionary crisis becomes most acute;

(5) in view of the possibility that the government will dissolve the State Duma
and convene a new Duma, this Congress resolves that in the subsequent
election campaign no blocs or agreements shall be permitted with the Cadet
Party or any similar non-revolutionary elements; as for the question
whether our Party should take part in a new election campaign, it will be
decided by the Russian Social-Democrats in accordance with the concrete
circumstances prevailing at the time.

Notes

[1]The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks drafted for the Fourth
(Unity)
Congress their resolutions on the attitude to the Duma. By the time this
question had come up for discussion at the Congress both drafts, written prior
to the Duma elections, were obsolete, and new drafts were proposed instead. The
committee which was set up at the seventh session of the Congress to draft a
joint resolution on the Duma and which comprised G. V. Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod,
V. I. Lenin, F. I. Dan, I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov (Fyodorov), A. V. Lunacharsky
(Voyinov) and 0. A. Yermansky (Rudenko), did not reach unity, and submitted two
draft resolutions to the Congress:
a Menshevik one, prepared by Plekhanov, Axelrod and Dan, and a Bolshevik one,
prepared by Lenin, Skvortsov-Stepanov and Lunacharsky. The new Bolshevik draft,
written by Lenin, was read by the chairman of the Congress at its sixteenth
session, and by Lenin at its seventeenth session, during his co-report on the
Duma. It was published in Volna, No. 12, after the Congress, on May 9,
1906, with an afterword by Lenin (see p. 401 of this volume).